Which Truth Is Your Truth?

I find myself thinking a lot about truth lately. Maybe because of the abuse of the word “truth” I see around me?

Someone said about a ministry colleague that he was not lying. “It’s only that his concept of truth differs from yours.” Someone else was talking about a family dispute and said “the problem is you are all living in a lie”. If truth is truth, in both these cases, someone is lying. The ultimate aim should be to discover the truth. Anything else is a copout

People often vehemently protest that their point of view is truth. Politicians especially are adept at this kind of persuasion. However, to the honest observer it quickly becomes apparent that there are different “truths”. That is the only explanation for the often opposite viewpoints that are promoted by different people as being truth.

There are different kinds of truth.

It is an absolute truth that the earth is round. However, the fact that there are still some people who believe it is not round attests to the fact that we actually often believe what we want to believe rather than believing the real truth.

There is what I would call faith truth, like Jesus is God. We base our faith on that on the trust that the Bible is true, and our experience of our relationship with Jesus. We cannot prove it scientifically, just as we cannot really prove scientifically that God created the universe. It begins to look like proof when we realize that more questions are answered when we we believe that God created the universe, that Jesus is God, and all the things that go with that, than not believing it.

Then there is purely subjective truth: “Pap and vleis are the best food ” – a traditional South African delicatessen. Only those who love it would agree with this statement.

It is not wrong for us to have different viewpoints. Where it becomes wrong, maybe even dangerous, is when we consider ourselves to be the expert in every area of life; when we deny others the privilege of having their own opinion. Most dangerous of all, is when our motive is proving that we are right rather than seeking truth.

We should first of all recognize our own fallibility. How’s that for an absolute truth! We should also recognize what kind of truth we are talking about when we bandy the word “truth” about.

There are “people of the lie” (see M. Scott Peck wrote a book “People of the `lie”). They are a a certain kind of person who never wants to accept responsibility for their own mistakes or weaknesses, even perhaps wrongdoing, but constantly hides behind others, blaming everyone else for everything that is wrong in their lives. In that respect that kind of person is like Satan, who is the inventor of the lie.

Can truth hurt? It only hurts those who do not want to hear it. We need to realize, and this applies particularly to Christians, that the manner in which we convey truth can also hurt. That is why the Bible exhorts us to “speak the truth in love.”